Digital and Projected Advertising Displays: regulatory and road safety assessment guidelines is intended to help road safety professionals including engineers, technicians, and planners within jurisdictions:

·         develop their own digital and projected advertising display (DPAD) regulations

·         evaluate DPAD permit applications

·         assess their potential road safety impact.

The guidelines are:

·         applicable to all road types and are specific to road safety; they do not consider the aesthetic, nuisance, economic, or other factors associated with these types of signs

·         based on a comprehensive literature review, survey of Canadian jurisdictions, review of sign by-laws, interviews with international jurisdictions, discussions with advertising and sign industry representatives, and the application of human factors and road safety engineering principles

·         designed to encourage consistent practice across Canada and promote transparency, reasonableness, and flexibility in regulating and permitting DPADs

·         founded on the five guiding principles of safety, consistency, specificity, evidence and pragmatism, which provide a framework for controlling DPADs without knowing precisely their impact on road safety.

Readers may also consult the primer, available free of charge, Digital and Projected Advertising Displays: Regulatory and road safety assessment guidelines (2015).

Background: Rapid changes to digital and projected advertising display (DPAD) technologies, and associated reductions in costs of these devices, have greatly increased requests for application approvals of installations of these devices near roadways. With the increase in light intensity, resolution, animation functions and size of these devices, road authorities are challenged with establishing appropriate application guidelines for this quickly-changing technology. Without appropriate regulations in place for these devices, more of them are being installed without understanding potential negative impacts to road users and this has resulted in growing concerns of road authorities and the motoring public of driver distraction and other potential safety related outcomes.

The print version of the guidelines document is accompanied by a CD ROM containing a knowledge base and environmental scan.  The-book document contains the guidelines, knowledge base and environmental scan within the e-book format.